After a 2 week hiatus for travel here is another Uncertainty Wednesday. After going through probability I had promised a concrete example. As a 50 year old male one that is close to home is prostate cancer. The system in question is the prostate and simplistically it can be in two states (A) healthy and (B) with cancer. I am saying simplistic because there are various severities of prostate cancer in terms of aggressiveness and whether or not the cancer is still contained in the prostate. Thi...

After a 2 week hiatus for travel here is another Uncertainty Wednesday. After going through probability I had promised a concrete example. As a 50 year old male one that is close to home is prostate cancer. The system in question is the prostate and simplistically it can be in two states (A) healthy and (B) with cancer. I am saying simplistic because there are various severities of prostate cancer in terms of aggressiveness and whether or not the cancer is still contained in the prostate. Thi...

Last week in Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the example of the PSA test for prostate cancer. I provided all the probabilities for elementary events assuming a 50-year old male. We then did some simple addition to figure out the probability that I would receive a high PSA level signal which turned out to be P(H) = 0.091302. The crucial question then is (quoting from the previous post)What we are looking for is P(B | H) this is read as the probability of state B *conditional* on signal H b...

Last week in Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the example of the PSA test for prostate cancer. I provided all the probabilities for elementary events assuming a 50-year old male. We then did some simple addition to figure out the probability that I would receive a high PSA level signal which turned out to be P(H) = 0.091302. The crucial question then is (quoting from the previous post)What we are looking for is P(B | H) this is read as the probability of state B *conditional* on signal H b...

Last night we got back from an epic ski trip to Hokkaido, Japan. Going there as a family was my 50th birthday wish and something I had been looking forward to for several years. I am thrilled to say it was everything I had hoped for. We spent four days skiing in and around Niseko and then another four days near Furano. Thanks to Hokkaido Power Guides, we had lovely and capable guides in both areas. We did a fair bit of off piste skiing which often involved some amount of skinning to get back ...

Last night we got back from an epic ski trip to Hokkaido, Japan. Going there as a family was my 50th birthday wish and something I had been looking forward to for several years. I am thrilled to say it was everything I had hoped for. We spent four days skiing in and around Niseko and then another four days near Furano. Thanks to Hokkaido Power Guides, we had lovely and capable guides in both areas. We did a fair bit of off piste skiing which often involved some amount of skinning to get back ...

Apologies to all those who were anticipating an Uncertainty Wednesday post today. I am taking a two week hiatus. Today for announcing our investment in Top Hat and next week I will be out skiing. Will resume the week after that with a detailed example.

Apologies to all those who were anticipating an Uncertainty Wednesday post today. I am taking a two week hiatus. Today for announcing our investment in Top Hat and next week I will be out skiing. Will resume the week after that with a detailed example.

One of my favorite questions to ask business students is why companies require external financial capital (equity or debt). Answers tend to turn quickly towards some need to invest, e.g. in developing software or building a plant. But that doesn’t fully answer the question. Why? Because what if the investment in development can be paid for by customers ahead of time? Well in that case there is no need for external investment. This is of course something we now see in the real world via Kickst...

One of my favorite questions to ask business students is why companies require external financial capital (equity or debt). Answers tend to turn quickly towards some need to invest, e.g. in developing software or building a plant. But that doesn’t fully answer the question. Why? Because what if the investment in development can be paid for by customers ahead of time? Well in that case there is no need for external investment. This is of course something we now see in the real world via Kickst...

Tomorrow I am turning 50. I don’t normally write about birthdays but in my work with entrepreneurs I often tell them that a big milestone, such as raising a new round of financing, is a good time for reflection. My 50th feels like such a milestone. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel extraordinarily lucky and thankful. Other than a few nits, I am healthy. I get to work with wonderful partners, the terrific team at USV and an incredible group of entrepreneurs doing something that I love. I hav...

Tomorrow I am turning 50. I don’t normally write about birthdays but in my work with entrepreneurs I often tell them that a big milestone, such as raising a new round of financing, is a good time for reflection. My 50th feels like such a milestone. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel extraordinarily lucky and thankful. Other than a few nits, I am healthy. I get to work with wonderful partners, the terrific team at USV and an incredible group of entrepreneurs doing something that I love. I hav...

In the last two Uncertainty Wednesdays, we went over the basic math of probability and the definition of events. Today we are going to come back to the underlying framework of reality, explanations and observations which we have modeled as states and signals. As a reminder, we assumed two states, A and B and two signal values H and L for four possible elementary events AH, AL, BH, and BL. The signal values are what we can observe whereas the states are not directly accessible to us. So no let...

In the last two Uncertainty Wednesdays, we went over the basic math of probability and the definition of events. Today we are going to come back to the underlying framework of reality, explanations and observations which we have modeled as states and signals. As a reminder, we assumed two states, A and B and two signal values H and L for four possible elementary events AH, AL, BH, and BL. The signal values are what we can observe whereas the states are not directly accessible to us. So no let...

One question I am getting a fair bit these days from German friends and family is: how come Republican politicians keep supporting Trump? Why aren’t more individual representatives speaking out, say calling for an independent investigation of potential interference by Russia? By what mechanism are they being held in line with party leadership? In Germany there is a well understood mechanism of “party discipline” that arises from the party’s role in arranging the “list order,” which is the ord...

One question I am getting a fair bit these days from German friends and family is: how come Republican politicians keep supporting Trump? Why aren’t more individual representatives speaking out, say calling for an independent investigation of potential interference by Russia? By what mechanism are they being held in line with party leadership? In Germany there is a well understood mechanism of “party discipline” that arises from the party’s role in arranging the “list order,” which is the ord...

We spent the first week of our NYU Stern class talking about value creation. The goal is to ask the seemingly simple question as to how a given company creates value. The first step of course is to ask what we mean by value. Some students wanted to jump immediately shareholder value. But shareholder value is the *result* if a company both creates value and has a means of capturing (some of) that value. So then what is value here? It is ultimately always that an enduser gets something they val...

We spent the first week of our NYU Stern class talking about value creation. The goal is to ask the seemingly simple question as to how a given company creates value. The first step of course is to ask what we mean by value. Some students wanted to jump immediately shareholder value. But shareholder value is the *result* if a company both creates value and has a means of capturing (some of) that value. So then what is value here? It is ultimately always that an enduser gets something they val...

Today in Uncertainty Wednesday we are continuing with some of the math of probability. As a reminder from last Wednesday, we have two states, A and B and two signal values H and L for four possible elementary events AH, AL, BH, and BL. We defined events as some combination of elementary events. So for instance we could have E = {AH, BL}. We write P(E) for the probably of event E and we saw that P(Ø) = 0 and P({AH, AL, BH, BL}) = 1. Since events are sets, we can also reason about the probabili...

Today in Uncertainty Wednesday we are continuing with some of the math of probability. As a reminder from last Wednesday, we have two states, A and B and two signal values H and L for four possible elementary events AH, AL, BH, and BL. We defined events as some combination of elementary events. So for instance we could have E = {AH, BL}. We write P(E) for the probably of event E and we saw that P(Ø) = 0 and P({AH, AL, BH, BL}) = 1. Since events are sets, we can also reason about the probabili...